Leaving Beirut

by Ghoussoub, Mai;

  It took me a few days to convince some of my friends – who had grown up in the slums around Beirut, and who had built their way out of them through trade-union activities – to accompany us, the French couple and me, to this disreputable cabaret. My friends disliked the idea intensely. The cabaret was located in a narrow street off the Place des Martyrs, in a neighbourhood that ‘any respectable woman should avoid after sunset’.

  When they finally saw the looks of my French actress, they went mad. They gave me a dressing-down in Arabic. ‘You want us to take this Marilyn Monroe into a place like that? We’ll need weapons. You haven’t seen the faces of the men who frequent your Masrah Farouk.’

  My friends, it appeared, knew influential people in the milieu of downtown cabarets, and thanks to their acquaintances we had some ‘protection’ assigned to us. We were the only two women not on the stage at Masrah Farouk; the rest of the audience was all male and very much so. As we appeared through the door, some eighty to a hundred faces, most with moustaches, turned and looked in our direction. They were evidently puzzled by our presence, and stared in bewilderment at the blonde French woman and her green eyes. They did not dare express their amazement in any other form, on account of the over-sized and nasty-looking men who had been allocated to protect us. ‘Us’, who were introduced to the management of the cabaret as ‘representatives of the international art scene’. That was our alibi, our passport to seats that were used only to male posteriors. ‘The world of high French art is visiting the arts scene of Beirut,’ my Lebanese friend said loudly, looking at the rest of the audience with an over-wide smile. Our two protectors were not very discreet about being heavily armed, and stood behind us all through the show, the only two women in the place. I will never know whether the fact that we were accepted was due to toleration or to the Colt revolvers that our protectors revealed every time they stretched and adjusted their jackets.

  The men in the seats around us were set for a great night, and their ebullient mood matched their expectations. Like us, they had paid two pounds apiece for a night of music, comedy and women entertainers. It was summer and it was hot. The barman, who carried his drinks in a box hanging from his shoulders by a broad black strap, walked up and down the theatre peering suspiciously at the clientele and assessing the level of their thirst. His ferocious expression was the secret of his prosperity. He would arrive at your seat and automatically, even before consulting you, would open the bottle and announce the brand as if it was something you had just ordered. He chose the drinks he offered according to the faces of the customers. As he passed our seats he opened two bottles of ‘imported’ Fanta, his most expensive soft drink, handed them silently to us, and then waited quietly to be paid. None of the customers dared argue with him, for he had a thick, imposing moustache, and a sharp and visible knife attached to his belt. People were there to be titillated, to forget about the misery of the day, or because it was nicer than sleeping in the shops where they worked all day. They weren’t after fights or arguments. Not yet, anyway. Who needs to argue over the price of a cheap drink when the night is so full of promise?

  Suddenly a thunderous sound erupted from behind the faded, but nonetheless rich, velvet curtain. The show was about to start, and a deep male voice introduced the first star of the evening, ‘The Little Flower of Palestine’. We applauded energetically when a little ten-year-old girl, all dressed in white, began singing ‘Ana Wardat Falastin’ – ‘I am the flower of Palestine’. Her crystalline voice and childlike innocence were there to remind us that before the fun and spice we should remember the nationalist struggle. ‘The little girl is going to bed now,’ we were assured after she had left the stage. This fact was presumably revealed for the benefit of the ‘Morality Police’, who would anyway have been bribed to turn a blind eye.

  Now the audience was ready for the whirling and shimmering of the belly dancer Farida, ‘The Star of the East’. Farida advanced very slowly towards the stage. There were days when she could swirl like a serpent and shake like a glittering bubble. But today she was tired, and maybe a bit too fat, and her steps were those of swollen feet. Her shimmers consisted of bored vibrations of her tits and her bottom. The laziness of her steps did not seem to bother anybody. The audience treated her as if she was the star of all stars. Farida directed a suggestive glance towards the balcony, from which somebody threw down a red flower. She winked playfully back. This was when I noticed that the balcony was occupied by a few privileged men. They would have paid five pounds instead of two, and for this they had the luxury of having their drinks poured into the glasses that they would then raise in celebration of tired Farida, and the privilege of having their hubble-bubbles fed with burning coal by a younger version of our barman. Looking up at the privileged customers on their balcony, one could see that this theatre had enjoyed more prestigious times. The frontage of the balcony still bore traces of Gaudiesque decorations, and the ceiling must have impressed many a visitor in years gone by. The decline of this little showbiz heaven seemed to be obvious only to us, the two gender-different members of the audience. Everyone else had their eyes fixed on the performers and the charms they were so generously displaying for their benefit. By now Farida was busy shaking her tits and quivering her round parts for the sake of the man with the tiny body and the big, colourful hubble-bubble, who was smiling from behind his thick moustache. Farida was not young, but her admirers did not care, or maybe they did not notice. When people want to dream, nothing can stop them. When Farida left, dragging her feet and her heavy body slowly off the stage, a small, trim man dressed in vaudeville style, his face undecided between a Groucho Marx expression and a Clarke Gable finish, stepped to the middle of the stage to inform us that ‘The Flower of Palestine is safely asleep at home, having sweet dreams.’ This was presumably in case we were worried for the moral health of our young generation. ‘The Flower of Palestine’ was not to be allowed to watch Farida working for the titillation of her admirers.

  Now the small man announced ‘The purest voice of all, the sweetest of all singers, the Star of all Stars, the Nightingale of East and West alike: Lubna, who will enchant you with a selection of songs.’ Lubna arrived to the accompaniment of drum beats and loud whistles from the public. We two women were also applauding, and trying hopelessly to whistle, to the great surprise of our minders, who no longer knew what to make of us. Lubna’s skin was fair and the dress she wore was so tight that her ample body seemed to come pouring out of it. Lubna was blond, too blond even for a Swedish woman. As she undulated her way generously to the centre of the stage, she announced the title of her first song: ‘This is where I draw a red line.’ The title of the song was clear, as was the meaning of her lines. Giving us a wonderfully suggestive smile, Lubna pointed at her lips and sang ‘Here your kisses are welcome.’ Then she repeated the words, still smiling, and pointed at her neck. Then at her enormous breasts. And finally, changing the expression on her face to a look of horror, she screamed rather than sang and crossed her hands on her tight dress at the level of her vagina. ‘Here, never, your kisses will never be allowed. This is where I draw a red line.’ The audience was completely mesmerized by her and when she indicated the forbidden zone, all the audience – all, that is, except us two women – cried in unison, ‘Why not …? Why not …? Please Lubna.’ Some said it pleadingly in all seriousness, others for the sake of the show, but most of them were half playing and half serious. Lubna had these males at her feet now, so she announced the title of her next song: ‘I have no man, I need a man’.

  I don’t remember any of the tunes sung by ‘The Star of all Stars’. I guess they didn’t vary much from one song to the next. What changed was the audience’s growing expectation for more obvious suggestiveness on the part of Lubna. Having expounded her longings for a man in two or three songs, she felt moved to continue her act flat on her back with her legs apart, singing as if in despair: ‘I need a man, I need a man’. Her song became a summons. A call issuing from the desperation
and fullness of her body. All the spectators stood up so as to see more of her: the privileged customers in the balcony leaned perilously over the rail. We women did not want to miss anything, so we stood up too, stretching upwards in order to have a better view of Lubna’s act. Our minders had apparently forgotten us entirely, and they rushed to the front to stop some zealots who were trying to jump over onto the stage, screaming ‘Ana, Ana!’ (Me! Me!) I am here for you.’ They did not have much trouble sending people back to their seats, for the fans were also, somehow, playing Lubna’s game.

  The French actress looked at her colleague, and then at me, and said, ‘C’est du Molière, c’est du pur Molière.’ Her colleague, finally calming down along with the rest of the audience, sat back in his seat and declared, ‘C’est ce qu’on appelle du happening. C’est ça le théatre.’

  Lubna and Farida were the two high points of the evening. The show continued late into the night. We drank many Fantas that evening, and when the theatre closed its doors the city was still awake outside and warmly welcoming.

  A few months later I read in a small item in the corner of the last page of an Arabic daily that a fire had broken out at Masrah Farouk and had destroyed the whole building. Nobody was hurt but the theatre had been closed until further notice. That was the end of Masrah Farouk, and soon after it died the war started.

  Honour and Shame

  Beirut has changed. You wouldn’t recognize it if you came back. One thing is still the same as in the old days, though – those days when people like you were not afraid to stay and live in its chaotic beauty. The city still has a very lively transport network. Thousands of private cars, capable of taking up to five passengers apiece, circulate on routes whose logic is not immediately apparent. The cars stop to pick you up in the same way that a taxi would, and they drop you off wherever you want, even if this means holding up a queue of rush-hour traffic in the process. You pay the driver, at any time on the way, a fee which is agreed via a consensus arrived at by equally non-apparent processes. The important thing here is not the ingenuity of the system, or its anarchy, but the microcosm of life inside these cars over the distance of a few kilometres.

  People of different class, sex and geographical origin are obliged to share a narrow space, their bodies squeezed one against the other: two next to the driver, and three on the back seat. This can be misery for a woman if she has the misfortune to end up sitting next to a groping male. He skilfully contrives to extend his allotted space so as to place a roving hand on the thigh of his female neighbour or to rub his thigh against hers. What happens then depends on the character of the lady in question. She may shyly try to squeeze herself away next to the door, or closer to the other passenger, or she may come straight out and tell the man to go to hell for his lack of decency. If she opts for the latter approach, all the passengers in the car, the driver included, will feel it their duty to become involved, and they will start insulting the molester. Having been in such situations I can tell you that the really skilled groper can make it very hard for you. The skilled molesters can be so subtle that when you glare at them, or try squeezing yourself away from them, they act as if they’re just overly well-built, or hadn’t realized that they were occupying more space than they should. Their eyes say that it was just an accident and you should give people the benefit of the doubt. And if it’s a borderline case, making a scene about decency – and having the other passengers insult the man for his lack of honour, with phrases like ‘Have you no sister …? Have you no wife? Aren’t you ashamed of insulting a woman’s honour?’ – may be a trifle unfair. My worst experience was when, armed with a feminist self-confidence freshly acquired from having read The Female Eunuch, I glared at the owner of an intruding hand that had landed subtly between my thighs, looked him in the eye and inquired as acidly as I could manage: ‘Couldn’t you find somewhere else to put your hand, instead of between my legs?’ ‘Oh sure,’ he said with a dirty smile, ‘but its much nicer in there.’

  Travelling for a few kilometres in one of these cars one learns a great deal about one’s own society. If we had observed more closely as we rode in the common taxis – Service, as we call them – then we might have been more aware of the impending civil war. We might have thought more carefully about the aggression that erupted quite habitually in fights between two drivers whose ‘rights’ had come into conflict. Immediately before the war, a lot of car accidents ended up in bloodshed, because the outcome would be resolved and blame allocated by the guns that were pulled from the drivers’ belts.

  Earlier, when our society had been more stable, we had many times watched as a sweating Service driver got out of his car and physically threatened his opponent with the gesticulations of a man saying ‘Hold me back or God knows what I’ll do to him.’ There would always be enough volunteers among the passers-by to hold him and send him back to his car with a hearty slap on the back. Men had an ever-present need to show that they wouldn’t let their pride be smashed without raising hell. It was no easy matter for a man to assert his manliness and honour in this city, where he had to drive for endless hours in the burning heat or through the flooded streets to make a living, to pay for all those attractive consumer goods, in the knowledge that security for his family’s health and a decent education for his children were simply unattainable at any affordable price.

  Honour, revenge and identity are all very intertwined in my country of origin. They took different forms, and even looked remote to many of us, with the modernisation and rapid cosmopolitanism of Lebanon, but they were there nonetheless. A mere ten or twenty miles from the capital Beirut, we still occasionally heard of a woman having been murdered because her brother or her father had decided to avenge their defiled honour with her blood. The power of blood and its ties and symbolism has not died in any human society. On the shores of the Mediterranean, blood still kills women, but elsewhere its sexual contamination still has the power to frighten even the most ‘advanced’ of societies into a state of hysteria. (When you request an entry visa to the USA, you are required to provide information about your HIV status.)

  ‘Honour is in the eye of the beholder,’ This was the prevalent attitude during my adolescence, in the place where I grew up. ‘What would the neighbours say about us?’ was a refrain that I heard almost every day. The NEIGHBOURS! If I acted in any way that failed to correspond to the norm (for instance, if I was seen with some young man, or coming out of a cinema on my own, or being driven home late at night by friends who were not all female) I would be giving reasons for others to question my honour. In a curious way, it didn’t matter what I actually did. What mattered was who saw what, and how it might have been interpreted and, most important of all, how it was going to be reported. For the interpretation arrived at by neighbours and others would not concern me alone – it would affect all of my family, and they would be judged and blamed as readily as if they themselves had been seen doing the unthinkable. People would have reasons to speak badly of all of us.

  In Arab Islamic societies it is very rare for people not to marry. Celibacy is considered to be anti-social, even anti-religious. So if a woman is single and seems to be in danger of staying unmarried, everybody around gets active in trying to marry her off. And they usually succeed. How many elder sisters have been given in marriage with threats such as: ‘You have to behave. Your reputation has to be spotless. If you tarnish our image, your younger sisters will be left unmarried, and their spoiled lives will be a consequence of your actions.’ Generally this kind of advice is forced onto a woman who rejects a suitor because he doesn’t suit her, or who is on the verge of rebelling against a tyrannical husband.

  If a distant relative died, whom I had possibly seen for no more than ten minutes in my whole life, I was expected to dress in black for at least forty days. Otherwise, people – the neighbours, the shopkeepers, the hairdresser at the street corner – would blame my whole family for my scandalous behaviour. This obsessive fear of the threatening word ‘sharaf’(
honour) was there both in the family’s frightened eyes and in the neighbours’ curious scrutiny.

  This word and its inflated power also appeared in school, in the French Lycée. But here it came with the smirk on the lips of the teacher. Monsieur Pierre, the enthusiastic young socialist French cooperant with whom most of us girls were slightly in love, fed us values that were imbued with the French republican spirit: ‘Montesquieu said that honour is a typically monarchical value. Republican government is based on virtue and respect for the law.’ Worse than that, M. Pierre, who charmed us all – and whom I am sure you would have appreciated, had you not left the country – had a favourite saying by Racine, which he often quoted in the classroom: ‘Without money, honour is nothing but a sickness.’ In school we all had to learn by heart the tragic lines of Don Diegue in Le Cid: ‘O rage, O désespoir, O vieillesse ennemie – N’ai-je donc tant vécu que pour cette infamie …’ The whole poem had something of a folkloric taste in our recently modernized minds. When we recited it we thought of M. Pierre, and we accompanied the verses with over-exaggerated gestures, turning tragedy into comedy. The word ‘infamies’ in particular often had us falling over our desks with laughter.

  However, in our Lycée Français the word ‘honour’ was far from remote. It featured in all its glory on the Tableau d’Honneur, which was (and still is) a sort of ritual which rewards the individual’s work and cleverness in the same way that criminals are branded, by exhibiting their names publicly for all to see. Honour, in the view of our French school, was something acquired through effort, work and excellence, not through the sword or virginal chastity, or matters of blood. Our teachers had been ‘contaminated’ by the now unavoidable influence of psychology and relativism in the judgement of human behaviour. Now ‘bad’ and ‘good’ needed longer and less assertive phrases in order to be defined. They were, we were once told by M. Pierre, often interchangeable, according to the position from which you looked at them.